Help needed with scanned VHS sleeves

[TwistedNerve]

Hello all, my first post...

When I scan old VHS video sleeves, the main background colour is often creased and/or faded etc. I've tried the "colour smoothing" option in the scanner software but this leads to poor results. The only other option I've tried is in Photoshop, by highlighting the various areas with the selection tool and replacing the colour, but this too is far from ideal as a lot of the old colour is still left inside letters and text etc.

Is there a better way to achieve a "like new" video cover scan?

 

[Radjesh Klauke]

I don't think that this is what you would like to hear, but I recommend you create your own custom cover. Although it's a lot of work, but I bet it's less then working with a (poor) scan of the original. Saying that I don't know how mnuch expertise you have with PS.

 

[IamSam]

Hi TwistedNerve and welcome to the forum!

Post one of you scans and let us see what your working with and what kind of help, if any, we can offer.

I assume there would be many different covers with their own specific images/artwork and might be difficult to create a custom cover.

 

[TwistedNerve]

These are for archive/reproduction purposes so the covers must be the originals.

Here are two examples:

 

[Radjesh Klauke]

My first impression: A lot of work, but possible. I personally would go by recreating the complete cover to match the original. Like I said: Time consuming, whatever solution you choose.

 

[TwistedNerve]

An old designer friend of mine woudl use channels to replace the background colours. No idea how he did it though.

 

[dv8_fx]

That's a lotta work ahead... even to rework / retouch the scans. But your best bet is that you may have to re-construct those VHS covers.

The bright side is that you can google image search for the cover images like Devil's Express. There's a good large size and sharp image of it. Download the image and use that to replace the image in the cover. You could even use it's Movie title text to replace the one on the backbone. For the video network logos, you may need to reworrk them or use google image search for a good clear copy. Just crop out the parts needed to ease the search. Crop out text so you can use that for text search at WhatTheFont! « MyFonts

Start by adding a new layer filled with the cover's color on top of the original scan layer. Drag in the new images. lower opacity of the new background so you can resize and properly position the new parts.


If properly and patiently done, it's well worth the effort and worthy of being an ARCHIVE material. And you could make it look better layout-wise than the original scan....

 

[dv8_fx]

And here's a quick go at it....